BULLETIN

November/Novembre 2017 Number/le numero 61

WHAT’S INSIDE

Articles

Announcements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Book Review: Algebra in Context [Mike Molinsky] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12Joint AMS/MAA Meetings in San Diego . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16Uta Merzbach (1933–2014) [Peggy Aldrich Kidwell] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17Quotations in Context [Mike Molinsky] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20MAA Convergence Resources [Janet Beery] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21PM Now Online-Only [Robert Thomas] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22PayPal Update . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23Book Review: Rebel Genius [Craig Fraser] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23PhilMath-Archive Launched [Elaine Landry]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25York University Computer Museum [David Orenstein] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25CSHPM on Social Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Reports

President’s Message [Dirk Schlimm] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Annual Executive Council Meeting CSHPM/SCHPM .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92018 Call for Papers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13AGM of CSHPM/SCHPM [Patricia Allaire] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18General Meeting HSSFC [Amy Ackerberg-Hastings] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26New Members . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27From the Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Canadian Society for Historyand Philosophy of Mathematics

Societe canadienne d’histoire etde philosophie des mathematiques

ISSN 0835-5924

ABOUT THE SOCIETY

Founded in 1974, the Canadian Society for the His-tory and Philosophy of Mathematics / Societe cana-dienne d’histoire et philosophie des mathematiques(CSHPM/SCHPM) promotes research and teaching inthe history and philosophy of mathematics. O�cers ofthe Society are:

President: Dirk Schlimm, McGill University, Mon-treal, QC H3A 2T7, CA, dirk.schlimm@mcgill.caVice-President: Maria Zack, Point Loma NazareneUniversity, San Diego, CA 92106, USA, MariaZack@pointloma.edu

Secretary: Patricia Allaire, 14818 60th Ave., Flush-ing, NY 11355, USA, PatAllaire@gmail.comTreasurer: Gregory Lavers, Concordia Univer-sity, Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, CA, Greg.Lavers@

concordia.ca

Past President: Elaine Landry, UC Davis, Davis,CA 95616, USA, emlandry@ucdavis.edu

Members of Council

Craig Fraser, University of Toronto, Toronto, ONM5S 1K7, CA, craig.fraser@utoronto.caJean-Pierre Marquis, Universite de Montreal, Mont-real, QC H3C 3J7, CA, jean-pierre.marquis@u-

montreal.ca

Karen Hunger Parshall, University of Virginia,Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA, khp3k@eservices.virginia.edu

Joel Silverberg, 31 Sheldon Street, Providence, RI02906, USA, joel.silverberg@alumni.brown.edu

Volunteer Positions

The Society’s Web Page (www.cshpm.org) is main-tained by Michael Molinsky, University of Maine atFarmington, Farmington, ME 04938, USA, michael.molinsky@maine.edu. The Proceedings of the An-nual Meeting are edited by Maria Zack and DirkSchlimm (see above). The Society’s Archives aremanaged by Eisso Atzema, University of Maine,Orono, ME 04469, eisso.atzema@maine.edu. Har-dy Grant, hardygrant@yahoo.com, andAmy Acker-berg-Hastings, aackerbe@verizon.net, edit theCSHPM Notes column for Notes of the CanadianMathematical Society. Maritza Branker, NiagaraUniversity, Lewiston, NY 14109, mbranker@niagara.edu, serves as CMS Liaison.

New Members are most cordially welcome; please con-tact the Secretary.

President’s MessageWe’re slowly coming to the close of another very suc-cessful year for the CSHPM. The highlight for mewas our annual meeting, held at Ryerson Universityin Toronto in conjunction with the Congress of theHumanities and Social Sciences on May 28–30. If Icounted correctly, we had 40 exciting talks coveringa wide range of topics and time periods. From Sun-day morning to Tuesday afternoon we had ten di↵er-ent sessions, including five parallel sessions. The twospecial sessions on “History of 18th century mathe-matics” were organized by Rob Bradley and Pat Al-laire, and they nicely framed the 2017 Kenneth O. Maylecture given by William Dunham, who presented uswith a fun and engaging talk on “A tale of two se-ries.” The program also included two sessions thatwere organized jointly with the Canadian Philosoph-ical Association on “New perspectives on logic in thenineteenth century, from Kant to Russell,” organizedby Sandra Lapointe and Greg Lavers. The organi-zation of the general program was in the able handsof Eisso Atzema, and Craig Fraser was in charge ofthe local organization. I thank all participants, ses-sion chairs, and organizers for bringing together thiswonderful event.

Our next meeting will be held June 4–6, 2018, inMontreal—just between some festival and the For-mula 1 Grand Prix. We will meet at the Universitedu Quebec a Montreal in conjunction with the an-nual meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Associa-tion. The Kenneth O. May lecture will be given byEmily Grosholz. Eisso Atzema will organize again thegeneral programme, Jean-Pierre Marquis will lead thelocal organizing committee, and the special session on“History of philosophy of mathematics” will be orga-nized by me. I am looking forward to seeing many ofyou next summer in Montreal!

Because the elections of our new o�cers are held ineven-numbered years, there has been little change atthe helm of the CSHPM. After accomplishing the Her-culean talk of organizing our archive, Mike Molinskydecided to step down and Eisso Atzema has acceptedto take over the position of Archivist. Many thanks to

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Figure 1: William Dunham

Mike for this important work! I am also very happythat Mike will continue his great service as our Web-master. For the 2018 elections a Nomination Commit-tee comprising Chris Baltus, Dan Curtin, and LarryD’Antonio has been formed. If you have a nominationin mind, please contact one of the members.

With regard to our outreach activities, I am happyto report that the free PhilMath-Archive was o�ciallylaunched in May 2017. This is a preprint server aimedat promoting communication in the field of philos-ophy of mathematics by the rapid dissemination ofnew works. Our Past-President Elaine Landry hasbeen instrumental in initiating this project and get-ting it o↵ the ground. Please, take some time tohave a look at it and to submit your preprints, athttp://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/philmath.html.

Our other ongoing projects continue to go energeti-cally. Amy Ackerberg-Hastings and Hardy Grant havebeen editing the “CSHPM Notes” column devoted tohistory and philosophy of mathematics, written by ourmembers, in CMS Notes with great success. The latestone, “Learning Mesopotamian Mathematics,” by Dun-can J. Melville, just appeared. These contributions areaccessible online at http://cms.math.ca/notes.

As in previous years, Maria Zack has been the drivingforce behind the timely and successful publication ofProceedings of our annual meetings. The volume fromthe 2016 meeting in Calgary, which includes the pa-per “Bolzano against Kant’s Pure Intuition” by PaulMcEldowney, the recipient of the CSHPM Award forbest student paper, is currently in the last stages ofproduction and should hit the shelves shortly. Finally,in early December there will be a session on the his-tory of mathematics at the CMS Winter meeting inWaterloo, ON, organized by our CMS Liaison, Mar-

itza Branker. Many thanks to Elaine, Amy, Hardy,Maria, and Maritza for all their fantastic work!

As you can see, the CSHPM train continues to roll fastand strong!

Dirk Schlimm

AnnouncementsDavid Bellhouse has been named an Honorary Mem-ber of the Statistical Society of Canada. This awardis intended to honor an individual who has made ex-ceptional contributions to the development of the sta-tistical sciences in Canada and whose work has hada major impact in this country. The citation to hisaward reads, “To David R. Bellhouse, for his manycontributions to survey sampling and to the history ofprobability and statistics; for his excellence in train-ing and mentoring; for his academic leadership; andfor his dedication to the profession.”

As a Canadian sesquicentennial project, David hasalso been digitizing the 1827 cyphering book of SirJohn A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime ministerat Confederation in 1867. See www.stats.uwo.ca/

faculty/bellhouse/macdonald/john_a_macdonald_

math_notebook.htm.

Congratulations to Dan Curtin on his retirement fromWestern Kentucky University, which became o�cialduring our 2017 meeting at Ryerson University.

Tom Drucker has been appointed to the Jewish StudiesAdvisory Council at Princeton University.

In spring 2017, Lee Stemkoski received the AdelphiUniversity College of Arts and Sciences Excellencein Teaching Award, and Toke Knudsen was awardedthe SUNY-wide Chancellor’s Award for Excellence inScholarship. Ron Callinger’s book Leonhard Euler:Mathematical Genius in the Enlightenment (Prince-ton, 2015) was chosen by CHOICE as one of its Out-standing Academic Titles for 2016.

Bernard Hodgson will receive the 2017 CMS Excel-lence in Teaching award at the CMS Winter Meetingin Waterloo in December. Besides enthusiastically de-veloping courses and mentoring students at UniversiteLaval, he was Secretary General of ICMI from 1999 to2009.

The International Union of History and Philosophyof Science and Technology (IUHPST) announced thatTheodore Arabatzis of Athens won its first essay prize,for “What’s in it for the historian of science? Reflec-

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tions on the value of philosophy of science for historyof science.” He presented the contents at the 25th In-ternational Congress of History of Science and Tech-nology in Rio de Janeiro, July 23–29. For more in-formation, see the Inter-Division Commissions/JointCommission page of iuhps.net.

Sara J. Schechner will receive the 2018 LeRoy E.Doggett Prize for Historical Astronomy. She isDavid P. Wheatland Curator of the Collection of His-torical Scientific Instruments at Harvard and will de-liver the plenary lecture at the 231st meeting of theAmerican Astronomical Society in January 2018 atNational Harbor, MD.

Carol Mead, long-time archivist at the AmericanArchives of Mathematics, has been named Head ofArchives and Manuscripts at the Dolph Briscoe Centerfor American History, University of Texas at Austin.

Peace to the memory of Robert S. Cohen (1923–2017), who died on June 19. He was known for hiswork on Marin Mersenne’s philosophy, among otheractivities at Boston University’s Centre for Philoso-phy and History of Science. An obituary appears atwww.bu.edu/cphs/about/robert-cohen/.

Jean-Pierre Kahan (1926–2017) passed away on June21. He was ICMI president from 1983 to 1990 andcentral to many other ICMI activities and studies, inaddition to his research in harmonic analysis and prob-ability.

TRansforming Instruction in Undergraduate Mathe-matics via Primary Historical Sources (TRIUMPHS),a NSF-funded e↵ort dedicated to teaching math-ematics from primary historical sources, now of-fers instructors a selection of 23 full-length PrimarySource Projects (PSPs) and 17 shorter “mini-PSPs.”Site testing continues. See webpages.ursinus.edu/

nscoville/TRIUMPHS.html.

Bram Roosen of Brepols announces the publicationof Correspondence of Luigi Cremona (1830–1903), ed.G. Israel, 2 vol. It includes ca 1,000 letters , conservedin the Department of Mathematics, “Sapienza”, Uni-versity of Rome. The edition is volume 97 in the seriesDe Diversis Artibus. Collection of Studies from theInternational Academy of the History of Science. Seebit.ly/2tbxi5X.

Oxford University Press has released A Portable Cos-mos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, ScientificWonder of the Ancient World by Alexander Jones(2017).

Matt DeVos and Deborah A. Kent have publishedGame Theory: A Playful Introduction in the AMSStudent Mathematical Library series.

Paul Halpern has published The Quantum Labyrinth:How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolution-ized Time and Reality with Basic Books (2017). In2016, Springer issued Historiography of Mathemat-ics in the 19th and 20th Centuries (part of the se-ries Trends in the History of Science), edited byVolker R. Remmert, Martina Schneider, and HenrikKragh Sørensen. Gert Schubring published “Searchesfor the origins of the epistemological concept of modelin mathematics” in Archive for History of Exact Sci-ences 71, no. 3 (2017): 245–278. The Universityof Chicago Press published Science in the Archives:Pasts, Presents, Futures, edited by Lorraine Daston(2017).

The Whipple Museum of the History of Science isextremely proud to publish as a free E-book AnitaMcConnell’s 1997 research monograph, A Survey ofthe Networks Bringing a Knowledge of Optical Glass-Working to the London Trade, 1500–1800. See theExplore Collections/Astronomy section of www.sites.hps.cam.ac.uk/whipple/. UCL Press has madeMichael Boulter’s Bloomsbury Scientists: Science andArt in the Wake of Darwin available as an open ac-cess book, goo.gl/Gevke8. Rounded Globe Publish-ers o↵ers a number of books in many fields as freedownloads. Works on history and philosophy of sci-ence are mainly found under the Moral Science link atroundedglobe.com/.

The Oughtred Society announces the publication ofan English translation of the biography of Curt Herzs-tack, inventor of the Curta Calculator. See www.

oughtred.org.

NCTM acquired The Math Forum in 2015 when it lostits relationship with Drexel University. Unfortunately,financial di�culties led the NCTM Board of Directorsto ask The Math Forum sta↵ to relocate to Virginia.The sta↵ elected not to do so, and The Math Forumwill close January 1, 2018. Some archival content willbe retained on nctm.org.

The American Mathematical Society has acquired theMathematical Association of America’s book publish-ing program. Stephen Kennedy has moved to AMSwith the program. MAA members will continue toreceive a 25% discount on MAA Press books.

Three papers were named winners in HOM SIGMAA’s

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annual student contest: Nathan Otten (UMKC),“Huygens and The Value of all Chances in Games ofFortune”; Johan Gaebler (Harvard), “Traditionalism:1894 to 1925”; and Amanda Akin (Lee), “To Infinityand Beyond: A Historical Journey on Contemplatingthe Infinite.” All three may be read on the HOM SIG-MAA and MAA Convergence websites.

BSHM News: The 2017 AGM and Gresham CollegeLecture were held on October 25. Upcoming meetingsinclude: “From Games to Game Theory” at Birm-ingham and Midlands Institute on December 9 and“Reading Euclid in the early modern world” at AllSouls College, Oxford, on December 14–15.

FedCan News: Gabriel Miller began a five-year termas Executive Director on May 1. The 2017 Congresswas the largest ever, with over 10,000 in attendance,and included a visit from the Honourable Kirsty Dun-can, Minister of Science. Miller posted an op-ed,“Canada needs to confront the causes of a post-truthworld,” coordinating with a Big Thinking panel, “Ex-pertise in a post-truth era: How to be a trusted advisorin a low-trust world,” at the 9th Canadian Science Pol-icy Conference on November 2. A webinar on assessingimpacts in the HSS was held October 26. For more in-formation and recordings, see www.ideas-idees.ca/.

An open workshop on “London 1600–1800: Commu-nities of Natural Knowledge and Artificial Practice”was held at the Science Museum June 16–17. Seemetsci.wordpress.com.

“New Perspectives on Science and Religion in Society”was held June 29–July 1 at Newman University, UK.

The Writing History seminar, on the pleasures andchallenges of writing history for a wider public, beganholding monthly meetings at New York University atnoon on September 15. See writinghistoryseminar.com.

The workshop “Mathematics and Mechanics in theNewtonian Age: historical and philosophical ques-tions” was held September 18–20 at the University ofSevilla Institute of Mathematics. See gecomat1216.

wordpress.com/.

Ludmilla Jordanova delivered the inaugural Museumsand Galleries History Group annual lecture, “Muse-ums, Galleries and the Power of Portraits,” at theUniversity of London, September 21.

ORESME and the Midwest History of MathematicsConference held a joint meeting at Wabash College

in Crawfordsville, IN, September 29–30. Rob Bradleygave the keynote lecture on Jean le Rond d’Alembert,who was also the focus of the ORESME readings.Other CSHPMers on the program included DannyOtero, Janet Heine Barnett, Duncan J. Melville, andLarry D’Antonio.

The exhibition, L’Universo ad orologeria: L’Astrariodi Giovanni Dondi a Pavia, brings Dondi’s 14th-century complex planetary clock back to life and willbe on view at the Musei Civici del Castello Viscon-teo in Pavia from October 7 to December 23. Lec-tures and tours will be o↵ered throughout the exhi-bition. A video about the exhibition is available atwww.museicivici.pavia.it/.

University of Maryland University College hosted Cy-ber at the Crossroads, a one-day symposium on thepast, present, and future of the security of the US cy-ber infrastructure, on October 10.

Michel Serfati announces the first semester programfor the annual seminar on Epistemology and Historyof Mathematical Ideas, held Wednesdays at 2:00 pmat the Institut Henri Poincare in Paris: Michel Ser-fati (IREM), “Symbolisme mathematique et penseearborescente” on 11 October; Catherine Goldstein(CNRS), “Combinatoire et langage au 17e siecle,d’apres la these d’Ernest Coumet” on 15 Novem-ber; Michel Henry (IREM), “Aux origines de la loides grands nombres, l’apport historique de JacquesBernoulli” on 29 November; Michel Serfati (IREM),“Les compass cartesiens, une figure de pensee ma-thematique. Une etude epistemologique” on 6 De-cember; Claude Merker (IREM), “Les traites de Pas-cal sur la Roulette” on 17 January; Jean Lassegue(EHESS), “Ernst Cassirer, philosophe des sciences etsemioticien” on 24 January; and Liliane Alfonsi (ParisSud), “La di↵usion des mathematiques au XVIIIe dansles manuels d’enseignement: Du ‘pourquoi?’ au ‘com-ment?’” on 7 February.

The Interdivisional Teaching Commission held its 2ndInternational Summer School for History and Philos-ophy of Sciences, Technology and Education at LilleUniversity, Oct. 11–12. See summerschoollille2017.historyofscience.it/en/.

Lancaster University and the Royal Institution ofGreat Britain are o↵ering a free 4-week MOOC on“Humphry Davy: Laughing gas, literature and thelamp,” starting October 30 through the FutureLearnconsortium. See www.futurelearn.com/courses/

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humphry-davy.

The 2017 Novembertagung on the History of Math-ematics was held November 2–4 in Brussels with thetheme “Tools for research in mathematics, history andphilosophy.” GDR 3398 followed that meeting withan Instructional Conference in Marseilles, November6–10, with the theme “Mathematiques en circula-tion et en mutation: texts et theories dans le tempset dans l’espace.” See fconferences.cirm-math.fr/1758.html.

The National Alliance for Doctoral Studies in theMathematical Sciences brought together 200 under-graduates interested in applying to graduate schoolfor the 2017 Field of Dreams Conference in St. Louis,MO, November 3–5.

The 3rd International Conference on the History ofMeteorological Science and Technology was held inBeijing, November 6–7.

The International Society for Design and Developmentin Education met in Berkeley, CA, November 6–9. Theorganization also o↵ers a US$5,000 prize for excellencein design for education in science or mathematics. Seewww.isdde.org/isdde/index.htm.

A doctoral course on Inquiry in Mathematics and Sci-ence: The Interplay of Didactical and EpistemologicalPerspectives will be held in Copenhagen, November6–10. For more information, see the Course Overviewsection of www.ind.ku.dk/english/.

The History of Science Society met November 9–12in Toronto. History and philosophy of mathemat-ics on the program included the sessions, “VirtualRealities: Libraries and 19th-Century Science andMathematics in Britain and Its Empire,” “Works andNetworks in pre-Copernican Astronomy,” and “Vir-tual Realities: Libraries and 19th-century Science andMathematics in Britain and its Empire.” The follow-ing individual papers were also given: Jean-OlivierRichard, “Enjoyable Geometry: Pere Castel’s Ped-agogical Flair and Legacy”; Elena Serrano, “Medi-cal Arithmetic in Late 18th-century Spain: Gender,Paper Tools, and Social Ideals”; Allan Olley, “Wal-lace Eckert and Pure and Applied Science at IBM”;Bo An, “Pseudo-universals: Philology, Sinology, andMachine Translation”; David Theodore, “The Digi-tal Prison: Computing the Carceral State, ca 1970”;Christine von Oertzen, “At-home Census Compila-tion: Paper, Data, and Technologies of Orderliness”;Corinna Schlombs, “Productivity in Transatlantic Re-

lations: A Statistical Measure between the Bureau ofLabor Statistics and the Marshall Plan”; Jon Free-man, “Some Overlooked Mathematical Issues in the1905 Paper on Special Relativity”; Jennifer Thivierge,“Processing an Upgrade: Grace Hopper and BeatriceWorsley’s Activism for Women in Computing, 1945–1972” ; Jason Grier, “British Navigation as Scienceand Practice, 1673–1761”; Ralph Kingston, “SeeingLike a Circumnavigator: Early Nineteenth CenturyFrench Ships of Discovery as Centers of Calculation”;Nicholas Jacobson, “Quantifying Religious Di↵erence:A Thirteenth-century Mathematical Treatise on theBorders between Arabic Medicine and Latin MoralPhilosophy”; and Scott Walter, “Mathematics and theWireless World.” Deborah Wood presented the poster,“Mathematical Conversion: Christianity, Science, andthe State in the 17th-century Jesuit Mission to China.”2014 CSHPM Student Award winner Sylvia Nicker-son spoke on “A Seat at the Table: Publishers, Pe-riodicals, and the Agendas of Science and Religion,”and David Orenstein presented “Compare and Con-trast: The Context and Impact of Canadian Inter-national Geological (1913, 1972) and Mathematical(1924, 1974) Congresses.”

Silke Ackermann, Director of the Museum of theHistory of Science at Oxford, will deliver the FifthTurner Memorial Lecture, “In the Service of Reli-gion? ‘Science in the Islamic World’ in the Mu-seum,” at the In & Out Club in London at 5:30pm, November 20. For more information, see www.

scientificinstrumentsociety.org/.

The 5th International STEM in Education Conferencewill be hosted by the Queensland University of Tech-nology in Brisbane, November 21–23. See stem-in-

ed2018.com.au.

A one-day conference on The History of Women in En-gineering in the UK will be held at IET Savoy Place inLondon on November 27. The Women’s EngineeringSociety will be celebrating its centennial in 2019.

The Ancient & Medieval Sciences working group atthe Center for the History of Science, Technology, andMedicine in Philadelphia meets the second Thursdayof each month at 6:00 pm and is focusing on astronom-ical instruments during the Fall 2017 semester. Onlineparticipation is available. The next meeting is Decem-ber 14. See www.chstm.org/content/ancient-and-

medieval-sciences.

epiSTEME 7, the 7th International Conference to Re-

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view Research on Science, Technology and Mathe-matics Education, will be held January 5–8, 2018,in Mumbai. One of the four strands of the meetingis “Historical, philosophical and socio-cultural stud-ies of STM: implications for education.” DeborahLowenberg Ball is one of the keynote speakers. Seeepisteme7.hbcse.tifr.res.in/.

BSHS will host a Postgraduate Conference at the Uni-versity of Manchester on April 4–6. Abstracts andapplications for travel support were due November 6,2017. See chstmphdblog.wordpress.com/bshspg2018.

INDRUM 2018, on the teaching and learning of math-ematical topics at undergraduate and graduate levels,will be held April 5–7 at the University of Agder, Nor-way. See indrum2018.sciencesconf.org.

Harvard and Boston Universities will host a sympo-sium on Grappling with the Futures: Insights fromPhilosophy, History, and Science, Technology and So-ciety, April 29–30. Peter Galison is one of the orga-nizers. See millennium-project.org.

The 8th ICMI-East Asia Regional Conference onMathematics Education will be held May 7–11 inTaipei. See earcome8.math.ntnu.edu.tw/.

A conference on Learning by the Book: Manuals andHandbooks in the History of Knowledge will be heldat Princeton University, June 7–10.

The 10th International Conference on the Theory andApplication of Diagrams will take place in Edinburgh,June 18–22. See www.diagrams-conference.org/

2018/.

The 12 international congress of the International So-ciety for the History of Philosophy of Science (HO-POS) will be held in Groningen, The Netherlands,July 9–12. Submission deadline is December 1, 2017.See www.hopos2018.nl. Greg Lavers and AudreyYap are on the program committee. Before Febru-ary 1, HOPOS is seeking proposals from academic in-stitutions to host the 2020 meeting; see hopos.org/

conferences.html.

The International Congress on Mathematical Physicswill be held in North America for the first time in35 years, July 23–28 in Montreal. The Young Re-searchers Symposium will precede it on July 20–21.See icmp2018.org/en/welcome.

The Society for Social Studies of Science will meet inSydney, August 29–September 1. See www.4sonline.org/item/4s_sydney_18_announced.

The Fourth Asian History, Philosophy and ScienceTeaching Conference will be held in Hualien, Taiwan,November 21–23, 2018. Michael R. Matthews is co-organizing, m.matthews@unsw.edu.au.

Preparations have already begun for ICME-14 inShanghai, July 12–19, 2020.

His Holiness Pope Francis approved the issue of astamp by the Vatican Philatelic O�ce to honor MariaGaetana Agnesi on the occasion of the 300th anniver-sary of her birth, May 16, 2018. To encourage the Ital-ian government to also issue an Agnesi stamp, contactAngelo Di Stasi, angelo.distasi@mise.gov.it.

A special issue of Education Sciences on DispellingMyths about Mathematics solicits submissions byFebruary 28, 2018. See www.mdpi.com/journal/

education/special_issues.

Notes and Records of the Royal Society welcomes re-search articles, notes, and news in all areas of thehistory of science, technology, and medicine. Seersnr.royalsocietypublishing.org.

Research in Mathematics Education seeks three edi-tors to work as a team from January 2018 to Decem-ber 2021. A cover letter and 3-page CV are due to Dr.Sue Gi↵ord, S.Gi↵ord@roehampton.ac.uk, by Novem-ber 30.

The October HPS&ST Note is on the web at www.

hpsst.com. The Resources section of the new HPS&STwebsite o↵ers a variety of items, including notesand slides from education sessions at the Rio DHSTCongress in July 2017.

The Spring 2017 issue of Science Museum Group Jour-nal, on the theme of Sound and Vision, may be readat journal.sciencemuseum.org.uk.

The July 2017 issue of Journal of Humanistic Mathe-matics may be read at scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/.

Plato Journal o↵ers free access to its entire run from2001 to the present. See impactum.uc.pt/pt-pt/

revista?id=107851&sec=5.

Volume 23 (2017) of Medieval Encounters was devotedto Astrolabes in Medieval Cultures, with extended pa-pers from a 2014 conference at the University of Lon-don.

The Programming Historian, managed by an interna-tional team of humanists, o↵ers free tutorials on digi-tal methods, tools, and techniques, such as Geograph-ical Information Systems and Zotero. The site val-

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ues peer review, open source, and open access. Seeprogramminghistorian.org/.

The Scientific Instrument Commission’s new website isnow live: scientific-instrument-commission.org.SIC will hold a symposium September 3–7, 2018, in theNetherlands and will meet in 2021 with the IUHPSTCongress, which may be in Australia, New Zealand, orthe Czech Republic.

The international committee of ICOM for universitymuseums and collections (UMAC) has just completeda significant update of its Worldwide Database of Uni-versity Museums and Collections (initially developedin 2001), university-museums-and-collections.

net. Those involved with university museums andcollections are invited to add their repository to thedatabase.

The Database of Scientific Illustrators 1450–1950,containing 11,650 entries, is available at www.uni-

stuttgart.de/hi/gnt/dsi.

Videos and lectures from the University of Pitts-burgh Center for Philosophy of Science can be foundon its YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg. The Center’s website iswww.pitt.edu/~pittcntr.

Elsevier’s Publishing Campus o↵ers webinars and on-line lectures, including “Gender Bias in AcademicPublishing” and “10 Tips for Writing a Truly Terri-ble Review.” See www.publishingcampus.elsevier.

com/.

The Smithsonian Libraries Dibner Library has put to-gether a new research guide for the history of sci-ence and technology, library.si.edu/libraries/

dibner-library-history-science-and-technology.

National History Day o↵ers a variety of resourcesand webinars on historical research that are aimed atschool students but can be adapted to undergraduates.See nhd.org.

James P. Howard, II (JHU APL) and John F. Beyers(UMUC) are editing a volume on Teaching and Learn-ing Mathematics Online, aiming to develop a set ofstandard practices and to provide a handbook for avariety of situations encountered in distance learning.CRC Press expects to issue the book in 2019.

Budapest Semesters in Mathematics Education ac-cepts applications from undergraduates and recentgraduates on a rolling basis. See bsmeducation.com/.

Linda Hall Library Fellowship applications are due

January 16. A new o↵ering is the 80/20 Fellowship forpre-doctoral students who would like to spend 80% oftheir time researching the collections and 20% of theirtime curating an exhibition. See www.lindahall.

org/fellowships/.

The University of Florida Center for Latin Amer-ican Studies o↵ers Library Travel Research Grantsfor Spring and Summer 2018. Application deadlineis February 16. See www.latam.ufl.edu/outreach/

library-travel-grants/. Some of the collection isdigitized at www.dloc.com.

The XIX Universeum Network Meeting (on univer-sity museums and collections) may o↵er student travelgrants in the first quarter of 2018 for its conference inJune. Monitor universeum.it/meetings.html.

The Adler Planetarium is now a member of the Con-sortium for the History of Science, Technology, andMedicine, which means that researchers can applyfor CHSTM fellowships to work in the Adler col-lections. See https://www.chstm.org/. Also, theWebster Photographs Collection will be added toadlerplanetarium.org/collections.

The deadline for applications for the AMS Congres-sional Fellowship is February 15.

Royal Museums Greenwich o↵ers short-term stu-dent internships. See www.rmg.co.uk/discover/

researchers/opportunities-events.

Dominic Klyve has been elected as the next editor ofthe MAA’s College Mathematics Journal. His term aseditor-elect begins on January 1. Jason Douma is oneof the members of the inaugural MAA Congress, thesociety’s new form of governance, which elected Do-minic. Also at the 2017 MathFest, Deborah Kent andDavid Muraki received a Paul R. Halmos—Lester R.Ford Award for their article, “A Geometric Solutionof a Cubic by Omar Khayyam (...) in Which ColoredDiagrams Are Used Instead of Letters for the GreaterEase of Learners,” American Mathematical Monthly123, no. 2 (February 2016): 149–160, and ViktorBlasjo received a George Polya Award for “How toFind the Logarithm of Any Number Using NothingBut a Piece of String,” College Mathematics Journal47, no. 2 (March 2016): 95–100.

MathPath, directed by Stephen B. Maurer and atwhich a number of CSHPMers have served as faculty,received one of 17 Epsilon grants for summer mathe-matics programs in 2017. For a description of Math-Path, see our November 2006 issue.

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Michael J. Barany (Princeton) received an honorablemention from the IUHPST’s Division of History of Sci-ence and Technology for his dissertation, “Distribu-tions in Postwar Mathematics.” Margaret H. Hamil-ton and Rear Admiral Grace Hopper were awarded thePresidential Medal of Freedom in November 2016.

The History of Science Society is sponsoring three ses-sions at the American Historical Association confer-ence in Washington, DC, January 4–7: “Animals inthe Early Modern Atlantic World,” “Anatomy andthe Construction of Identity,” and “The Emergenceof Racial Modernities in the Global South.” This isthe first time in several years that the dates of AHA’sannual meeting and JMM are not in conflict.

Bruce Hunt will deliver the 2018 George Sarton Memo-rial Lecture in the History and Philosophy of Science,“Imperial Science: Victorian Cable Telegraphy andthe Making of ‘Maxwell’s Equations’,” at the annualmeeting of the American Association for the Advance-ment of Science in Austin, TX, on February 17 at12:00 pm. Sessions on “The Impact of Sputnik onScience, Technology, and the Public in the UnitedStates” and “Instruments of Science and Diplomacy:The Importance of International Research Organiza-tions” are also on the program. The next BritishSociety for the History of Science Postgraduate Con-ference will take place at the Centre for the Historyof Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM), Uni-versity of Manchester, on April 4–6. Abstracts frompostgraduate students on any aspect of the historyof science are welcome by November 6, and travelfunds are available. See chstmphdblog.wordpress.

com/events/bshspg2018/.

The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich is host-ing a history of navigation conference on May 24–25,on the theme, “Navigation, heroism, history.” Ab-stracts are due December 15, 2017. See www.rmg.co.

uk/content/history-navigation-conference-2018-

call-papers.

Iowa State University received an NEH grant for theproduction of a conference volume organized by con-tributors to The Cambridge History of Philosophy ofthe Scientific Revolution, Revolutions in the Historyof Early Modern Philosophy and Science.

The Dibner Library of the History of Science and Tech-nology in the National Museum of American History isseeking financial donors to “adopt” rare books in thecollection to fund urgently-needed repairs, including

seven volumes of the first edition of Denis Diderot’sEncyclopedie. The library is also hoping to purchaseseveral early modern mathematics books to build thecollections. See library.si.edu/donate/adopt-a-

book.

Peter Alfeld has made available his Slide Rule Ex-plorer, a java code that, upon entry of a mathe-matical expression, will tell users whether and howto evaluate that expression on a slide rule. Seewww.math.utah.edu/~pa/sliderules/SRE.html.

The latest doctoral dissertations in the histories of sci-ence, technology, and medicine have been uploaded towww.hsls.pitt.edu/histmed/dissertations.

The Robert H. Smith International Center for Je↵er-son Studies at Monticello o↵ers short-term fellowshipsof $2–3,000 which may also be used at the Univer-sity of Virginia. Application deadlines are April 1and November 1. See www.monticello.org/site/

research-and-collections/fellowships.

Annual Executive Council MeetingCSHPM/SCHPMThe meeting of the Executive Council of CSHPM/SCHPM took place at Ryerson University, Toronto,ON, on May 28, 2017. The following members werepresent: Amy Ackerberg-Hastings, Patricia Allaire,Eisso Atzema, Craig Fraser, Greg Lavers, MichaelMolinsky, Dirk Schlimm, Joel Silverberg, and MariaZack. Dirk Schlimm, President, called the meeting toorder at 12:40 pm.

The agenda for the meeting was approved, and min-utes from the 2016 Executive Council Meeting wereaccepted as printed in the November 2016 Bulletin.

Treasurer’s Report: Greg Laver presented a reportfor fiscal 2016 (the fiscal year is the same as the cal-endar year). The 2016 statements were published inthe May 2017 Bulletin. Greg pointed out that he didnot renew the maturing GIC investments in order tokeep su�cient cash available. Can$13,000 of our fundsare tied up in PayPal. A discussion followed on thismatter.

According to PayPal, Canada Revenue Agency is re-quiring certain documentation from CSHPM beforefunds can be released. Because of our unique status,we do not have such documentation.

We will appeal to the Federation for assistance, but,ultimately, we may need to register as a non-profit

9

Figure 2: Dirk Schlimm

organization. There are costs involved, and we mayneed to file an annual tax return.

Dirk and Greg will give this issue immediate atten-tion. We would like to be able to resume using PayPalfor membership payments and journal renewals, whichwill begin in November or December. [See the PayPalUpdate elsewhere in this Bulletin.]

Secretary’s Report: Patricia Allaire presented com-parative membership data for 2016 and 2017:

2016 2017Total Members 160 154Members By Address or Organization

Can 39 41US 92 100

Other 10 21BSHM 19 13CSHPS 4 5

Complimentary 0 0Members By Status

Active 98 96Retiree 42 43

Student 12 10Developing Nations 4 4Student Associate 0 3

Unknown 4 6Members by Pay MethodOnline 97 100

Snail Mail 26 30Reciprocal Members 23 19

Complimentary 1 6New Members 13 26

Reciprocal MembershipsTo BSHM 49 51To CSHPS 26 27

Journal SubscriptionsHistoria (paper) 58 57

Historia (electronic) 5 4Philosophia 24 25Proceedings

Federation 1 1Hardcover 8 10Paperback 24 16Electronic 10 6Bulletin

Paper 48 44Donations

No. Donors 17 20Amount $541.00 $862.50

Pat pointed out that there is some overlap of mem-bers in the “by address or organization category” andthat the status of reciprocal members from CSHPSand BSHM is not known. 44 paper Bulletins weremailed, 38 to current members, 1 to the Federation,and 5 to those from whom payment was anticipated.The number of members paying by snail mail is a bithigher than it should be because of the problem withPayPal; for several months, no one has been able topay using PayPal. She noted that the number of dona-tions has increased and that the total amount donatedis exceptionally high because there were two very gen-erous donations.

Bulletin Editor’s Report: Amy Ackerberg-Hastingsreported that publication went smoothly in the pastyear. She thanked the co-editors, Eisso Atzema andMaria Zack; the Secretary, Pat Allaire; the Webmas-ter, Mike Molinsky; and all of the 2016 contributors.All 3 editors are willing to continue in their positions.She reminded the Council that, since we explored al-ternatives to our home-grown Proceedings in 2013, we

10

have been considering making changes to the formatof the Bulletin. Amy finally formally solicited feed-back from members in late 2016, and all respondentssaid that the current form of the Bulletin serves theirneeds. So, the editors plan to continue with the statusquo for the foreseeable future. She has talked withMike about possibly posting announcements for im-mediate distribution on the Society’s Facebook andTwitter pages, although she had not pursued this fur-ther.

Amy reported some di�culty with getting (bothCSHPM and non-CSHPM) reviewers to finish writ-ing about the books that have been sent to them. TheBulletin is still running about two reviews per yearand really only has space for about four a year, so atpresent, this is not a huge problem. We debuted onenew column in May 2017 (Models of Mathematics),occasionally run O↵ the Shelf (reviews of older/classicbooks), and benefit from Mike’s amazing dependabil-ity with Quotations in Context. Amy is seeing nicegrowth in submissions of meeting reports and is alwayspleased to receive more. Additionally, professional andpersonal news, photographs, and contributions to ourcolumn series, or proposals for short articles of inter-est to historians and philosophers of mathematics arewelcome. If you wonder whether she has heard a newsitem, please feel welcome to go ahead and send it toaackerbe@verizon.net. Feedback is also always wel-come.

CSHPM Notes Editor’s Report: On behalf ofco-editor Hardy Grant, Amy Ackerberg-Hastings re-ported that the CSHPM Notes column ran in all sixissues of CMS Notes for the first time in 2016. In all,18 columns with 13 di↵erent authors (one of which isactually a pair of co-authors) have been published, in-cluding the 2013 and 2014 winners of the CSHPM Stu-dent Award. Three people have written two columns,and one person has contributed three times. Amy andHardy have made improvements at increasing the fre-quency of philosophical topics, so the overall distribu-tion is about 3 columns on history for every one col-umn on philosophy. They are having success at gettingpeople to consider or accept our invitations to writea column (about half the time they propose a subjectand half the time the authors choose their topics), butit is not as easy to get people to finish submissions.They have one item in reserve for emergencies and an-other that will be finished as soon as some externalissues are worked out, but they are looking for com-

pleted columns to meet deadlines in July, August, andOctober 2017. (They do have some potential commit-ments for early 2018.) The liaison at CMS continuesto turn over about once a year, but each new personseems quickly to get up to speed on producing theNotes. Hardy and Amy are willing to continue editingthe column.

Column articles are to be about 1,200 words and in-clude a brief biographical note. They should appeal toa wide audience, including both researchers and edu-cators.

Proceedings Editor’s Report: Maria Zack reportedthat Birkhauser/Springer Verlag has renewed our con-tract for another three years, covering the 2017, 2018,and 2019 Proceedings. They have been very pleasedwith the quality of the content. The 2016 volume,with 14 papers, has gone into production in India.The speed of the printing depends on how quickly thatteam makes it through the typesetting and revisionprocess (the timing has been variable). Maria notedthat the production of the Proceedings is a communitye↵ort, so she o↵ered many thanks to co-editors ElaineLandry and Dirk Schlimm and to the 20 people whohave served as referees over the last few years.

She planned to institute a slightly more aggressive sub-mission schedule beginning with the 2017 Proceedings.Because of the nature of faculty life, she regularly re-ceives requests for extensions at each stage (writing,refereeing and revision), which slows the overall pro-duction process down. The calendar for 2017 is asfollows:

• June 15, 2017: Notice of intent to write a paperdue

• September 1, 2017: Paper due• September 5, 2017: All papers to referees• November 1, 2017: Referee reports due to Maria• November 5, 2017: Notice of acceptance/rejection;All papers that need revisions returned to author

• January 15, 2017: Revisions due from authors (thisallows winter break to be used)

• January 20, 2017: Production process in India be-gins (publication usually takes 8–12 weeks)

CSHPM Student Award: Maria Zack reportedthat three submissions were received for the 2016 prize.Karen Parshall and Tom Drucker will read these pa-pers and, along with Maria, make the final determina-tion. The award for 2017 will remain at $1,000.

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Webmaster’s Report: Mike Molinsky reported thathe has continued to maintain and update the societywebsite and email listservs. In response to a sugges-tion, he will change the web page to make the links toour Facebook and Twitter accounts more obvious.

Archivist’s Report: Mike Molinsky has completedthe conversion of the CSHPM Archives to contain bothelectronic and paper copies of most documents. Heshared a detailed account of the process, records thatwere not feasible to digitize for various reasons, etc.,with the Council via email. Mike also created an in-ventory with very brief descriptions of all documentsin the Archives. He had expressed a willingness tostep down from his position, and Eisso Atzema agreedto take over as Archivist. Since both are located inMaine, they will transfer the boxes over the summer.

Phil Math Preprint Archive: Via email, ElaineLandry announced the launch of the PhilMath-Archive.See the announcement published elsewhere in this Bul-letin. The site accommodates material in the pre-peerreview stage, allowing authors to solicit feedback fromreaders. Dirk is currently serving as the CSHPM li-aison, but he would be glad to step down if someoneelse was interested in the position.

SCIAMVS Journal: Dirk reminded the Councilthat editor Nathan Sidoli had inquired whether wewould be interested in o↵ering our members the op-portunity to subscribe to SCIAMVS, which deals withancient and medieval sources, at a reduced rate. TheCouncil asked for more information, and Nathan re-sponded:

1. SCIAMVS will refer to our collaboration as anassociation, printing CSHPM’s name on the finalpage of the journal, above the subscription mate-rial, in a section called “Associated Societies”.

2. Subscription rates and information will be postedonline in a section on associated societies, sciamvs.org/order.html.

3. CSHPM members will receive a 10% discountfor the current volume and 5% for previous vol-umes. An additional 10% concessionary rate (forretired, student, unwaged, “developing” country,etc., members) will be o↵ered.

4. CSHPM is to send a list of members’ subscriptions,along with the collected fees, on an annual basis;SCIAMVS will then mail the journal directly tosubscribers.

5. SCIAMVS will send the Executive Council a short(1–2 pages) editorial report annually.

The Council agreed to accept the o↵er.

Future Meetings: In 2018, Congress will be inRegina, which is not convenient for a significant num-ber of our members. Other possibilities are that wemeet with CMS in Fredericton, NB, or jointly withCPA (Canadian Philosophical Association). After dis-cussion, it was decided that we will meet with CPA.Their meeting will be at UQAM in Montreal, June7–10 [later changed to June 4–7]. Sandra LaPointe isthe contact person for CPA. CSHPM will need a li-aison and session chairs. To be considered: SpecialSession topic and May speaker. CSHPM is interestedin inviting CSHPS to participate as well.

In 2019, Congress will be at the University of BritishColumbia in Vancouver, June 1–7.

CMS Liaison: Maritza Branker reported via emailthat we had a successful session at the Winter CMSmeeting in Niagara Falls in December 2016, and weare scheduled for a full session on December 9, 2017at the upcoming Winter CMS meeting in Waterloo,Ontario.

2018 Election: Three members for the nominatingcommittee will be selected at the AGM tomorrow.

Other Business: Dirk expressed thanks to the Coun-cil, editors, and conference organizers.

The meeting was adjourned at 1:55 pm.

Patricia Allaire, Secretary

Book Review: Algebra in ContextAlgebra in Context: Introductory Algebra from Ori-gins to Applications, by Amy Shell-Gellasch and J. B.Thoo. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,2015. 552 pp. ISBN 978-1-4214-1728-8. US$99.50.

History of mathematics textbooks can often fall intoone of two extremes. Those aimed at general au-diences may highly emphasize the history and onlytalk about mathematics in broadest terms, with lit-tle actual demonstration of calculation and methods.Other works that do delve deeply into the mathemat-ics are frequently aimed at students who already pos-

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CALL FOR PAPERS / DEMANDE D’EXPOSÉS

Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics Société canadienne d’histoire et de philosophie des mathématiques

Annual Meeting / Colloque annuel Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

June 4-6, 2018 / 4 juin – 6 juin 2018

Special Session / Séance Spéciale History of Philosophy of Mathematics

Kenneth May Lecturer / Conférence Kenneth May

Dr. Emily Grosholz, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA

The CSHPM will be holding its 2018 Annual Meet-ing at UQAM in conjunction with the 2018 CPA Meeting. The meeting will be held Monday through Wednesday, June 4-6, 2018. Members are invited to present papers on any sub-ject relating to the history of mathematics, its use in the teaching of mathematics, the philosophy of mathematics, or a related topic. Talks in either Eng-lish or French are welcome, as are presentations about work in progress. Graduate students are espe-cially welcome to present their work. All graduate students who present are eligible for the CSHPM Student Award. Please send your title and abstract (200 words or less) in Word, (non-scanned) PDF, or in the body of an email by February 1, 2018 to:

La SCHPM organise son colloque annuel de 2018 à UQAM, en association avec le colloque annuel de l’ACP. Le colloque aura lieu du lundi 4 juin au mercredi 6 juin 2018. Les membres sont invités à faire une présentation sur n’importe quel sujet de l’histoire des mathé-matiques, son utilisation dans l’enseignement des mathématiques, de la philosophie des mathé-matiques, ou tout autre sujet connexe. Des présenta-tions en anglais ou en français sont bienvenues, comme le sont les présentations sur des travaux en cours. Les doctorants, en particulier, sont invités à présenter leurs recherches. Tout doctorant qui fait une présentation est admissible au Prix des Étudiants de la SCHPM. Veuillez envoyer le titre de votre exposé, ainsi qu’un bref résumé de 200 mots ou moins en format Word, PDF (non-scanné) ou à l’intérieur d’un cour-riel avant le 1 février 2018 à:

GENERAL SESSION / SÉANCE GÉNÉRALE: Eisso Atzema Department of Mathematics & Statistics University of Maine Orono, ME 04469, United States eisso.atzema@maine.edu

SPECIAL SESSION/SÉANCE SPÉCIALE: Dirk Schlimm Department of Philosophy McGill University Montreal, QC H3A 2T7, Canada dirk.schlimm@mcgill.ca

13

sess a very strong background in mathematics, includ-ing calculus. This new textbook, Algebra in Context,falls between these two extremes, with an emphasis onunderstanding mathematical concepts and algorithmsaimed at students with a much more basic mathemat-ical background.

The book does assume that readers possess a basicgrounding in algebra, including simplifying algebraicexpressions, solving linear equations in one variable,or graphing linear equations in two variables; how-ever, some of these basic concepts are also reviewedin the text itself as needed; see, for example, section19.1, “Review of Linear Equations.” Even functionalnotation such as f(x) = y is often briefly explainedin the text or in a footnote when it arises (such as onpage 461).

At the same time, it should be noted that the materialdoes make much higher assumptions about the stu-dent’s facility with computation, attention span, andcareful observation of detail. Many of the historicalmethods that are examined in the text (for example,Cardano’s solution algorithms to cubic equations inChapter 21) are much more intricate and require farmore steps than the problems students would be likelyto encounter in a typical first-year college mathematicscourse, and careful observation and focus are neededto follow along through some of the most complicatedexamples. This level of complexity is a good thing andwill certainly provide students with a much strongermathematical understanding and fluency, but weakerstudents may need additional support and guidance tosucceed given these expectations.

Certainly one of the most immediately visible di↵er-ences between this text and a more traditional algebratextbook, or even many history-of-mathematics worksaimed at a general audience, is that scholarly sourcesfor all historical information and translations are care-fully and meticulously provided throughout the text.The authors also occasionally note where there is dis-agreement among sources (for example, in the discus-sion of the origins of the base 60 numeral system inMesopotamia on page 15), and in those cases eachscholar’s views are presented impartially.

The text, which contains significantly more informa-tion than could be covered in a single semester, is di-vided into four parts. Part I covers the basic conceptof a place-value system, as well as number systemsfrom Babylonia, Egypt, Rome, China, North Amer-

ica, India and the Middle East. Part II (the shortestof the four sections) covers a variety of historical algo-rithms for the basic arithmetic operations: addition,subtraction, multiplication, division, and approximat-ing square roots. Set theory, logic, rational and ir-rational numbers, and basic number theory are thetopics covered in Part III. Part IV, which takes up thefinal half of the textbook, moves on into algebra: solv-ing linear, quadratic and cubic equations, as well astopics such as factoring polynomials, solving propor-tions by the “rule of three,” and the development oflogarithms. While most of the chapters in each partincorporate historical methods throughout the mate-rial, there are a few chapters (for example, Chapters14 and 16 on Sets and Logic) where only a brief sum-mary of the history is provided and the topics are thenpresented using modern notations and terminology.

Problems in the text are organized in three separateways. Small sets of “Now You Try” exercises arespread throughout each chapter, and these questionsprovide a straightforward assessment of the most re-cent topic or method. Solutions to “Now You Try”problems are not provided in the text, and these setsof problems tend to be relatively small, but instruc-tors using the text should have little di�culty creat-ing similar problems for students who need additionalpractice.

The second type of problem, “Think About It” ques-tions, are also located throughout each chapter, butare much more challenging and generally test the stu-dent’s deeper understanding of concepts. While the“Now You Try” problems test the student’s abilityto replicate a given method, the “Think About It”questions tend to instead explore why a given methodworks or how it could be generalized. In the majorityof cases, the answers to “Think About It” questionsare woven into the following material (sometimes a fewpages later, but often immediately after the questionwas posed).

Additional exercises are grouped in a chapter at theend of each of the four parts. A small number ofthe exercises are roughly equivalent to the “Now YouTry” problems, in the sense of being straightforwardapplications of methods and algorithms already cov-ered; however, most require far more originality andproblem-solving on the part of the student, building onthe material from the text but requiring the studentto apply that knowledge in new ways. The problems

14

also vary significantly in terms of the amount of timeand computation required: for example, Ex. 7.23 onpages 79–80 has students explore a transcription ofthe entire Plimpton 322 tablet, identifying patternsand errors among the entries.

Exercises that can only be completed by additionalresearch outside the text itself are indicated with anasterisk, and like the other exercises vary greatly interms of complexity. Some can be answered after lessthan a minute on the Internet, such as *Ex. 13.28on page 139: “Leonardo of Pisa is also known as Fi-bonacci. What does Fibonacci mean?” Other starredexercises could easily be the topics of major researchpapers, or even entire books:

• *Ex. 7.48 (page 81) — Write about Archimedesand some of his mathematical achievements.

• *Ex. 7.86 (page 84) — What are the mathematicalphilosophies of intuitionism and empiricism?

• *Ex. 13.21 (page 138) — Write about Euclid’s Ele-ments and its significance to modern mathematics.

• *Ex. 18.74 (page 262) — Give an account of Fer-mat’s last theorem up to its proof by AndrewWilesin 1995.

Throughout the text, I was very impressed by the clar-ity of explanations and the extreme care taken to makesure each step of lengthy methods were coherent andwell motivated. I believe that the historical organiza-tion and presentation of the topics in most cases willpromote a far deeper and more intuitive understandingof the material than the more common presentationin modern algebra textbooks. That being said, therewere a few topics in the textbook where the inclusionof historical material seems to do little or nothing topromote student’s understanding of concepts. To giveone example, on pages 227–237, several propositionsfrom Book VII of Euclid’s Elements that present al-gorithms for calculating the greatest common factorand the least common multiple of two numbers arecarefully explained. In each case, the reader is care-fully led through the geometric arguments, step bystep, and also presented with a detailed example withnumbers to illustrate the process, but in both cases thegeometric argument from the Elements really doesn’tprovide any greater understanding of why or how themethod works. The authors themselves seem to rec-ognize this, saying on page 228, “If nothing else, theabove should give you an appreciation of the relative

simplicity and e�ciency of our modern algebraic nota-tion,” and on page 230, “You may have found Euclid’salgorithm as it is stated in the Elements not so easyto follow” (quite an understatement).

When presenting translations of historical material,the text almost always retains the exact notations thatappear in each source from which the translation wasdrawn. This decision makes sense, given that the textwas designed to promote independent research by thestudents, who may need to go to those same sourcesfor additional examples and information, and who alsoshould be prepared to find even more varied notationsin other sources they examine. Nonetheless, the lack ofuniformity of notations used in the text was occasion-ally confusing. For instance, in most of the book, whenbase 60 numerals are written using base 10 symbols,spaces are left between place values and a semicolonis used as the separatrix between whole numbers andfractions (for example, 1 13 48; 7); however, in Ex-ample 19.8 on page 278, a problem is drawn from asource that instead uses the semicolon to separate allplace values (that is, 1; 13; 48; 7). Another minor ex-ample of this appears on page 440, where two di↵erenttranslations of problems from Liu Hui’s commentaryon the work Jiu zhang suan shu (Nine Chapters on theMathematical Art) are shown: in the first example,the commentary is in boldface type, while the secondsource reversed this and used boldface for the originaltext. In fairness, the authors do usually explicitly ad-dress any changes or variations in notation right beforethey appear.

Given the public outrage that has been expressed overslavery word problems being assigned to students inrecent years, it should be noted that there is one prob-lem involving slavery in the text. On page 444, a prob-lem from the twelfth-century Indian work Lılavatı byBhaskara II demonstrates the inverse rule of three byusing the price of a female slave at age sixteen to cal-culate the slave’s value at age twenty. In a footnote,the authors correctly point out that any attempt toreview historical documents may expose students to“practices that today we would find to be unaccept-able,” and they state that it is important to considerthe “time and place in which they occurred.” This rep-resents only a single, isolated example, and no exer-cises or “Now You Try” problems involving slaveryare assigned to students, but instructors who plan tocover the material in this section may want to ded-icate class time for discussion of these issues. (On a

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personal note, I also really wish the footnote containedstronger language condemning the immoral practice ofslavery, since “unacceptable” to me sounds more likea description of running in the halls or wearing whiteafter Labor Day.)

The book was clearly written with extreme care, andfor such a large first edition, it contains relatively fewtypographical errors. Most of the typos I did findwere minor misspellings (for example, on page 259,“Eulcid” instead of “Euclid”), but a few of the er-rors appear in mathematical explanations and couldbe more confusing for students. For instance, in Ex-ample 6.1 on page 61, the final place value of 3.14159 isgiven as 9⇥ 10�6 rather than 9⇥ 10�5, and in Exam-ple 20.12 on page 331, the equation x

2 + 10x = 39is rewritten as x

2 + x � 39 = 0, dropping the co-e�cient of x (which does reappear in the followingsteps of the example). There was also one place wherefunctional notation had been reversed: on page 466,2,223,901.1263596 = L(15,033,221) should actuallyhave been L(2,223,901.1263596) = 15,033,221.

The book’s preface suggests that this text could beused for a history of mathematics course (particularlyone for education majors with no calculus prerequi-sites), a general education class including quantitativeliteracy or the study of other cultures, or even poten-tially at the high school level. In my own case, I fullyexpect to make frequent use of the text as a resourcefor material to incorporate in my current classes, in-cluding mathematical content courses for elementaryschool teachers.

Mike Molinsky

Joint AMS/MAA Meetings in SanDiegoA number of events in history and philosophy ofmathematics have been planned for the Joint Math-ematics Meetings, to be held in San Diego, Califor-nia, January 10–13, 2018. More information can befound on the MAA or AMS websites: www.maa.org orwww.ams.org.

Wednesday, January 10

• 8:00–10:50: AMS Special Session on History ofMathematics, I, organized by Sloan Despeaux,

Jemma Lorenat, Clemency Montelle, Daniel Otero,and Adrian Rice.

• 10:05–10:55: AMS Invited Address, “The Navier-Stokes, Euler and Related Equations,” by Edriss S.Titi.

• 14:15–18:05: AMS Special Session on History ofMathematics, II.

• 18:00–19:50: HOM SIGMAA Reception, BusinessMeeting, and Guest Lecture, “The history of Chi-nese mathematics: 60th anniversary of the found-ing of the IHNS (CAS), Beijing,” by Joseph W.Dauben.

Thursday, January 11

• 8:00–12:00: MAA Session on Humanistic Mathe-matics, organized by Gizem Karaali and Eric Mar-land.

• 13:00–15:50: AMS Special Session on History ofMathematics, III.

• 14:35–15:55: MAA Workshop on Writing Pedagog-ical and Expository Papers, organized by JanetBeery, Matt Boelkins, Susan Jane Colley, JoannaEllis-Monaghan, Brian Hopkins, Michael Jones,Gizem Karaali, Marjorie Senechal, and BrigitteServatius.

• 13:00–15:00: MAA Minicourse on Teaching Under-graduate Mathematics via Primary Source Projects,I, presented by Diana White, Janet Barnett, KathyClark, Dominic Klyve, Jerry Lodder, and DannyOtero, and sponsored by HOM SIGMAA. (NOTE:You must pre-register for this course.)

• 17:30–19:05: POM SIGMAA Reception, BusinessMeeting, and Guest Lecture, “Towards a philoso-phy of mathematics informed by the sciences of themind,” by Rafael Nunez.

Friday, January 12

• 8:00–10:50: AMS Special Session on History ofMathematics, IV

• 8:00–10:55: POM SIGMAA Session on Philosophyof Mathematics as Actually Practiced, organizedby Sally Cockburn, Thomas Drucker, and BonnieGold.

• 9:00–10:30: AMS Panel on Historical Chief Editorsof the Notices, organized by Frank Morgan.

• 13:00–15:50: MAA Invited Paper Session on Poly-hedra, Commemorating Magnus J. Wenninger, or-ganized by Vincent Matsko.

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• 13:00–18:00: MAA Session on Good Math fromBad: Crackpots, Cranks, and Progress, organizedby Elizabeth T. Brown and Samuel R. Kaplan.

Saturday, January 13

• 8:00–11:45: AMS Special Session on AlternativeProofs in Mathematical Practice, organized byJohn W. Dawson, Jr.

• 9:00–9:50: AMS Retiring Presidential Address,“The Concept of Holonomy—Its History and Re-cent Developments,” by Robert L. Bryant.

• 13:00–15:00: MAA Minicourse on Teaching Under-graduate Mathematics via Primary Source Projects,II

At press time, an MAA General Contributed PaperSession on the History or Philosophy of Mathematics,organized by Tim Comar and James Reid, was plannedbut not yet scheduled.

Uta Merzbach (1933–2014)Uta C. Merzbach, curator emeritus of mathematics atthe Smithsonian’s National Museum of American His-tory (NMAH), died suddenly on June 27, 2017, of aheart attack at her home in Georgetown, Texas. Shewas born in Berlin, Germany, on February 9, 1933, thedaughter of Margarete K. and Ludwig H. Merzbach.Uta and her parents were deported from Berlin tothe concentration camp at Terezin (Theresienstadt)on April 8, 1943, where they remained until it wasliberated on May 9, 1945. She would celebrate V-EDay for the rest of her life. After time at a displacedpersons camp in Deggendorf in Bavaria, the family ar-rived in New York as refugees on May 23, 1946, andlater settled in Georgetown. Merzach’s parents bothhad doctorates from the university in Berlin and bothhad academic careers, her father mainly at Southwest-ern University in Georgetown.

During two years in high school in Brownwood, Texas,Merzbach took special pleasure in playing trumpetin the marching band. She then studied at DanielBaker College of Southwestern University and wenton to the University of Texas at Austin, where sheearned a BA in 1952 and an MA in mathematics inJanuary 1954, shortly before she turned twenty-one.She taught for a short time at Radford School for Girls

Figure 3: Uta Merzbach with Museum visitor, 1986

in El Paso, Texas, before entering Radcli↵e GraduateSchool (Harvard would not admit women to its Grad-uate School of Arts and Sciences until 1962). She re-ceived a PhD in mathematics and the history of sci-ence from Harvard in 1965, with I. Bernard Cohen andGarrett Birkho↵ directing her dissertation, “Quantityto Structure: Development of Modern Algebraic Con-cepts from Leibniz to Dedekind” (1964). From 1960to 1966, much of the time she was a graduate stu-dent, she assisted Garrett Birkho↵ in editing the 1973A Source Book in Classical Analysis. Birkho↵ de-scribed Merzbach’s contributions in the Preface: “Shedrafted translations of most of the selections used, pro-vided historical introductions to them, and collabo-rated in revising the material.” From 1964 until herretirement in early 1988 she tended the mathematicsand computer collections at NMAH (known as the Na-tional Museum of History and Technology from 1964to 1980).

Merzbach was the Smithsonian’s first curator of math-ematical instruments, hired at a time when the nationplaced great emphasis on improving math and sci-ence education. She relished collecting objects, driv-ing across the country and traveling the globe to findobjects for the museum. The collections she acquiredare international in scope, with a primary emphasison objects made and used in the United States. Theyrange in date from an 11th-century astrolabe madein Muslim Spain to early microcomputers. Manu-facturers such as IBM and Apple; schools like Har-vard, MIT, Wesleyan, UCLA, and the University ofMichigan; government agencies; and numerous privateindividuals provided materials, usually as donations.Merzbach used some of these acquisitions in exhibitson topics ranging from ancient mathematics to elec-

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tronic computing to mathematical paintings to math-ematics education. In addition to her path-breakingwork collecting and displaying mathematical objects,she made pioneering contributions to the compilationof oral histories for the history of computing, the useof computer interactives on the museum floor, andthe e↵ort to track museum objects with computerizeddatabases.

Merzbach also published on the history of mathemat-ics and of science. Some of this work related to ob-jects at the museum and was quite outside the usualbounds of the history of mathematics. With her col-league, the historian of medicine Audrey B. Davis, shewrote Early Auditory Studies: Activities in the Psy-chology Laboratories of American Universities (1975).This was an account of psychological apparatus usedin the US, particularly around 1900. The follow-ing year, as part of an exhibit plan, she published astudy of devices used in education in that country,from slates to computer-aided instruction. She alsowrote Georg Scheutz and the First Printing Calcula-tor (1977), an account of a Swedish di↵erence enginepurchased for use by mid-19th-century American as-tronomers. Not wishing to neglect earlier objects, sheencouraged Sharon Gibbs and George Saliba’s prepa-ration of a catalog of Smithsonian astrolabes.

Merzbach also studied and published on topics morecommonly seen as part of the history of mathe-matics. Her papers include “An early version ofGauss’s Disquisitiones Arithmeticae” in Mathemati-cal Perspectives: Essays on Mathematics and its His-torical Development, edited by Joseph W. Dauben(1981) and “Idolatry, automorphic functions, and con-ceptual change: reflections on the historiography ofnineteenth-century mathematics” in Transformationand Tradition in the Sciences: Essays in Honor ofI. Bernard Cohen (1984). Others are Carl FriedrichGauss: A Bibliography (1984), “The Study of theHistory of Mathematics in America: A CentennialSketch” in the three-volume A Century of Mathemat-ics in America (1988–89) that she assisted in editing,and major revisions of the popular A History of Math-ematics by Carl B. Boyer (1989, 1991 and 2011). Shealso encouraged others to study the history of math-ematics by arranging conferences at the Smithsonianand then at Southwestern University that featured de-tailed examination of important mathematical texts.She participated actively in the American Mathemat-ical Society, particularly the celebration of its Cen-

tennial in 1988. Her mentoring e↵orts bore fruit insuch publications as Judy Green and Jeanne LaDuke’svolume Pioneering Women in American Mathemat-ics: The Pre-1940s PhD’s (2009). She retired in 1988to assist a long-time friend in Essex, Massachusetts.She continued her research in her retirement years, in-cluding work on her long-awaited intellectual biogra-phy of the 19th-century German mathematician PeterGustav Lejeune Dirichlet. At the time of her death,Merzbach was in the final stages of completing thatbiography.

Merzbach was a short woman of enormous will andstrong intelligence. When I began working for her in1984, she had straight steel-gray hair, thick glassesthrough which she saw much, and a winning smile.Though firm in her judgments, she loved to study anddisplay objects, to plan new ways of doing things, andto assist those she deemed competent.

For help in preparation of this document, I thank JudyGreen and Jeanne LaDuke.

Peggy Aldrich Kidwell

AGM of CSHPM/SCHPMThe Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Societyfor History and Philosophy of Mathematics took placeat Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, on May 29, 2017.The meeting was called to order at 12:20 pm by DirkSchlimm, President, with 32 members in attendance.

Agenda for the General Meeting

1. Approval of agenda2. Approval of minutes of 2016 AGM3. Treasurer’s report4. Possible incorporation as a non-profit organization5. Secretary’s report6. Bulletin Editor’s report7. CSHPM Notes Editor’s report8. Proceedings Editor’s report9. 2016 CSHPM Student Award10. Webmaster’s report11. Archivist’s report12. Phil Math Preprint Archive13. SCIAMVS Journal14. Future Meetings15. Nominating committee16. Thanks from the President

1. The agenda for the general meeting was approved.

2. Minutes from the 2016 AGM were accepted as

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Figure 4: Bernd Buldt

printed in the November 2016 Bulletin.

3. Greg Lavers presented the reports described in theExecutive Council meeting minutes. He pointed outthat income and expenses are approximately equal.

4. It appears that we will need to register with CanadaRevenue Agency as a non-profit organization in orderto continue to use PayPal and in order to access thefunds ($13,000) that are tied up by PayPal. A discus-sion followed:

• A member asked whether costs would be involved.Greg responded that there is the cost of registeringat both the federal and provincial level (approxi-mately $200 each). In addition, we may have tofile a tax return each year.

• Another member asked whether using PayPal fromthe US was a viable alternative. We investigatedthis option a number of years ago, and the require-ments would be similar. The cost to register in theUS is higher.

• All agreed that it is important that we attend tothis registration immediately so that PayPal willbe up and running by membership and journal re-newal time.

5. Patricia Allaire presented comparative membershipdata for 2016 and 2017. (Please refer to the CSHPMExecutive Council Minutes in this issue of the Bulletin

for the data.) She thanked the many members whoincluded a donation when they renewed membership.

6. Amy Ackerberg-Hastings requested submissions tothe Bulletin. She will use Facebook and Twitter fortime-sensitive announcements. She is having some is-sues with getting book reviews returned to her in atimely manner. Publishers also sometimes send hertoo many unsolicited books for review, and she hasrequested that they discontinue doing so and insteadcheck with her first. A member said he was findingthe two-column format di�cult to read in the elec-tronic Bulletin when he uses a mobile device. Amyand Eisso will look into the issue.

7. Amy Ackerberg-Hastings, on behalf of co-editorHardy Grant, noted that the CSHPM Notes columnran in all six issues of CMS Notes for the first timein 2016. The ratio of history to philosophy topics isabout 3:1. All articles may be seen on our website.

Amy encouraged members to submit articles. Theyshould be about 1,200 words and include a brief bio-graphical note. Articles should appeal to a wide au-dience, including both researchers and educators. Ex-amples of suggested subjects are the state of scholar-ship in your area, a snippet of your research, method-ology and practice, and examples of integrating historyor philosophy into teaching.

Tom Drucker suggested that it would be excellentto write on some philosophical idea aimed at non-philosophers.

8. Maria Zack announced the submission schedule forthe 2017 Proceedings that appears in the ExecutiveCouncil minutes. She said that referees are neededfor both history and philosophy papers. In responseto questions, Maria replied that we agreed to sell atleast 30 volumes to our members; however, Birkhausermakes its profit by the sale of articles, not from thesale of the volumes.

9. Maria Zack announced that there are three con-tenders for the 2016 CSHPM Student Award. KarenParshall, Tom Drucker, and Maria will serve as judges.The award for 2017 will remain at $1,000.

10. Mike Molinsky continues to maintain and updatethe society website and email listservs. He has madethe links on our webpage to our Facebook and Twit-ter accounts more prominent. Feedback is always wel-come.

11. Mike Molinsky described the status of the CSHPM

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Figure 5: Rob Bradley and Fred Rickey

Archives and announced Eisso Atzema as his suc-cessor. Members suggested that we should considerwhether material in the archives should be made moreavailable. To date, the only requests Mike has receivedare for articles from previous issues of the Proceedings.Tom Drucker suggested that we have more photos toinclude in the archives, e.g., group photos at our meet-ings.

12. Dirk repeated Elaine Landry’s announcement ofthe launch of the PhilMath-Archive, along with hiswillingness to continue as the CSHPM liaison or tostep down if another volunteer is available.

13. Dirk announced the possibility of discounts forSCIAMVS, which the Council agreed could be of inter-est to our members. (More details are in the minutesof the Executive Council meeting.)

14. Next year, we will meet with CPA (CanadianPhilosophical Association) at UQAM in Montreal.Their meeting is June 7–10 [subsequently changed toJune 4–7]; we will meet for 3 of those 4 days. Dirkasked that we consider a special session topic and aMay speaker that is related to philosophy.

In 2019, Congress will be at UBC in Vancouver, June1–7. Other possibilities for us are to meet with CMS(location TBA) or MAA (Cincinnati, OH).

15. A Nominating Committee for the 2018 electionwas recruited from the meeting attendees: Chris Bal-tus, Dan Curtin, and Larry D’Antonio.

16. Dirk expressed thanks to the Council, editors, andconference organizers. Craig Fraser invited attendeesto an evening party at his home. Roger Godard isgiving away his old Proceedings. Tom Drucker praisedDirk’s column in the May 2017 Bulletin.

The meeting was adjourned at 1:15 pm.

Patricia Allaire, Secretary

Quotations in Context“Thank God that number theory is unsullied by

any application.”

The quotation above is commonly attributed to Leo-nard Dickson, whose works include the three-volumeseries, History of the Theory of Numbers, published in1919–23. While the quotation does not appear in anypublished works written directly by Dickson, there doexist contemporary accounts that associate the quota-tion with him.

The attribution seems to trace back to the article“Graduate Student at Chicago in the Twenties,” whichappeared in the April 1976 issue of The AmericanMathematical Monthly, pages 243–248; a reprint canbe found in volume 2 of the 1989 A Century of Math-ematics in America, available on the AMS website.The author, William L. Duren, Jr. (1905–2008), helda wide variety of faculty and administrative positionsin his career, including serving as the very first Pro-gram Director in Mathematics at the National Sci-ence Foundation in 1952–53 and as MAA President in1955–56. Duren did his graduate work at the Univer-sity of Chicago, completing his Ph.D. in 1930, and thearticle provides a short history of the program as wellas many details of his experiences with the studentsand faculty there.

Dickson was one of the faculty at the University ofChicago and Duren mentions taking his course in num-ber theory. On page 244 of the article, the quotationof this column appears as part of a description of Dick-son’s personality and teaching:

He was an indefatigable worker and in pub-lic a great showman, with the flair of a roughand ready Texan. An enduring bit in the leg-end is his blurt: “Thank God that number the-ory is unsullied by any application.” He likedto repeat it himself as well as his account of hisand his wife’s honeymoon, which he said wasa success, except that he got only two paperswritten.

The phrasing here is very curious: note that Durensays that the quotation was a “bit in the legend” and

20

that Dickson “liked to repeat it himself.” One possibleinterpretation of the phrasing is that the quotation wasoriginally invented and attributed to Dickson by someother source, and then Dickson simply liked the storyso much that he continued to repeat it, but this mightbe reading too much into Duren’s choice of words.

I have found one example of a very similar quotationthat is not attributed to Dickson, in the April 1892issue of The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society ofGreat Britain and Ireland. On page 397, the followingsentence appears in the introduction to a notice writ-ten by Hartwig Hirschfeld for the book A Memoir onthe Coe�cients of Numbers by Brajendranath Seal:

It is said that the German mathematicianKronecker, at a scientific gathering in Berlin,proposed the health of The Theory of Num-bers, the only branch of mathematics, perhapsof human learning, as yet unsullied by a prac-tical application.

Unfortunately, it is unclear whether the entire state-ment is being attributed to Leopold Kronecker, or ifthe assertion that number theory is “as yet unsullied”was the book reviewer’s personal assessment. In eithercase, although this article does not entirely predateDickson (who would have been eighteen at the time),it does o↵er a possible alternative source for the originof the quotation.

Bonus Quotation in Context (at no extra charge): Thevague mention of a scientific gathering in Berlin mightbe a reference to the 1886 Berlin Conference of NaturalScientists. According to a 1892 obituary of Kroneckerby Heinrich Weber, it was at this conference thatKronecker made the famous statement, “Die ganzenZahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere istMenschenwerk,” or “God made the integers, all else isthe work of man.”

Mike Molinsky

MAA Convergence ResourcesFounded in 2004 by well-known mathematics histo-rians and educators Victor Katz and Frank Swetz,MAA Convergence is both an online journal on thehistory of mathematics and its use in teaching and anever-expanding collection of online resources to helpits readers teach mathematics using its history. This

Figure 6: Janet Barnett with students

freely available publication of the Mathematical Asso-ciation of America brings you a variety of interestingarticles and teaching tools. We highlight here someof our newest articles and resources for use in yourclassroom.

In “A Series of Mini-projects from TRansforming In-struction inUndergraduateMathematics via PrimaryHistorical Sources,” the TRIUMPHS team introducesthe first two of a collection of mini-Primary SourceProjects (mini-PSPs) for use in college mathematicsclassrooms:

• “The Derivatives of the Sine and Cosine Func-tions,” by Dominic Klyve, is a classroom assign-ment in which Calculus I students learn how Leon-hard Euler (1707–1783) obtained these derivativesvia di↵erentials.

• “Why be so Critical? Nineteenth Century Mathe-matics and the Origins of Analysis,” by Janet Bar-nett, motivates the formalization of analysis forintroductory analysis students. The photo showsJanet working with students at a TRIUMPHS SiteTester Workshop in Denver, Colorado, in Septem-ber 2016.

In “Illustrating The Nine Chapters on the Mathemat-ical Art : Their Use in a College Mathematics HistoryClassroom,” author Joel Haack shares how he usedhis experiences on an MAA Mathematical Study Tourto China to enrich his teaching. The photo of an in-tended user of the Nine Chapters, a civil servant fromthe Sui Dynasty (581–618), was taken in the NationalMuseum of China during Joel’s 2006 trip.

“Moses ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew Translation of al-Hassar’sKitab al Bayan,” by Jeremy I. Pfe↵er (Hebrew Uni-

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Figure 7: Sui Dynasty sculpture

versity of Jerusalem), features the arithmetic of frac-tions as you’ve (possibly) never seen it before and con-siders the influence of al-Hassar’s 12th-century workthroughout the Mediterranean region. See fractionsin the context of problem-solving using the method ofdouble false position in the Arabic manuscript Kitabal-nuzah in “Mathematical Treasure: The Method ofScales in ibn al-Ha’im’s Book of Delights,” by RandySchwartz and Frank Swetz, which includes the di-agram shown here. Besides “Impacts of a UniqueCourse on the History of Mathematics in the IslamicWorld,” author Nuh Aydin shares his motivation fordeveloping such a course, its structure and content,and its community service component.

In “Analysis and Translation of Ra↵aele Rubini’s1857 ‘Application of the Theory of Determinants:Note’,” Salvatore Petrilli and Nicole Smolenski arguethat Rubini’s work was a salvo for the ‘Analytics’ intheir struggle against the ‘Synthetics’ in 19th-centuryNaples.

In “Mathematical Treasures at the Linda Hall Li-brary,” Cynthia Hu↵man continues to highlight themathematics collections available at this rare book li-brary in Kansas City, Missouri. Her newest images are

Figure 8: Method of scales diagram

of mathematics books by Galileo, Cavalieri, L’Hopital,and Bishop Berkeley. Our “Index to MathematicalTreasures” includes hundreds of images for use in yourclassroom from dozens of libraries and sources.

Join us at the Convergence of mathematics, history,and teaching site, www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence for all of these articles and more!

Janet Beery

PM Now Online-OnlySeries three of Philosophia Mathematica has now com-pleted twenty-five years as the Society’s philosophicaljournal. This does not compare with the nearly forty-five years of its historical journal Historia Mathemat-ica, of course. HM ’s head start in association with theSociety is opposite to PM ’s overall head start. Begunin Chicago in 1964, PM was published by its found-ing editor, Joong Fang, until its second series endedin 1991. [Editor’s note: See also Robert’s memorialfor Fang in our November 2010 issue.] He told methat Ken May consulted him about the title ‘HM ’when he was preparing to launch it in the 1970s. Iwas amused to learn that May’s solution of the usualCanadian linguistic problem by using a Latin title wasdone in conscious imitation of Fang’s title, chosen forquite di↵erent (and unknown) reasons. I don’t thinkthat I had even heard of PM when I solved the sameproblem earlier in the seventies with the name ‘UtilitasMathematica’ for the new applied-mathematics jour-nal published at the Computer Science Department ofthe University of Manitoba. (It’s now in South Africawith language problems of its own.)

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One big thing has happpened to PM in its twenty-five years with the Society. Oxford University Press(OUP) has now published thirteen volumes in printand online, the latter being something that I couldnot do as its previous publisher. And now a second bigthing is happening. Because almost no one—neitherpersons nor institutions—is prepared to pay extra forprint copies of the journal, printing it has become anexpensive frill. This unwillingness to pay for print re-flects several facts. Libraries don’t want to store backissues. The online publication is the o�cial record andpublication date. Readers prefer to access materialonline. Material comes online as it is accepted, muchmore quickly than it can be assembled and printed.(A fairly extreme—for PM—example of this is a pa-per by Dirk Schlimm that appeared online (throughacademic.oup.com/philmat/advance-articles) on18 September 2014 but appears in the last print issueof 2017.) The number of copies printed is declining.

As a result of all this, OUP has decided that from2018 PM will be an online-only journal. Society sub-scriptions have been both online and print up to thepresent year, but from next year will unavoidably beonly online. Just as this Bulletin was going to pressthey announced to the Treasurer but not to me thatthere would be no personal subscriptions either. I havejust made some attempt to explain the first decision;neither have I heard nor can I make up an explana-tion for the second. They say personal subscriptionscan too easily be abused. While I can explain the firstchange, I regret it, being old and print-oriented, butOUP owns the journal and will be trying to persuadeother societies that own journals such as Mind and theBritish Journal for Philosophy of Science, publishedby OUP, to abandon print too. This is so obviouslythe future that we are plainly moving with the times.Whether a journal without subscribers is the wave ofthe future, even for PM, remains to be seen.

Because OUP is so large and distinguished a publisher,most academic members will have electronic accessto PM through an institutional library. Many insti-tutions subscribe to an Oxford package of journals,which may include PM. If PM is unavailable to anysuch member, the relevant library can be persuadedto have it added to what it subscribes to at a smallfraction of the single-journal subscription rate.

Robert Thomas

PayPal UpdateDuring the summer of 2017, Treasurer Greg Laversworked diligently to determine the paperwork neededfor PayPal to recognize CSHPM as a not-for-profit or-ganization. (See the AGM and Executive Council min-utes in this issue for information on CSHPM’s tempo-rary loss of ability to withdraw funds from its PayPalaccount.) He has now submitted the required docu-mentation (a utility bill and bank statement) and suc-cessfully transferred US$13,000 into the CSHPM bankaccounts. Webmaster Mike Molinsky has also ensuredthat the membership form on the website is workingcorrectly, so all should be ready for members to sub-mit their 2018 renewals. Membership letters will ar-rive from Secretary Patricia Allaire via email and alsoaccompany the print copies of this Bulletin. Thanks toour o�cers and volunteers for sorting out these issues!

Book Review: Rebel GeniusRebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisci-plinary Life in Science, by Tara H. Abraham. MITPress, 2016, 320 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-03509-5. £32.95,US$40.00.

Warren Sturgis McCulloch (1898–1969) was a promi-nent figure in American neurophysiology and neu-ropsychiatry from the 1930s to the 1960s. Althoughnot himself a mathematician, he advocated a quanti-tative mathematical approach to human biology. Heis best known for a paper he published in 1943 withWallace H. Pitts (then barely out of his teens) devel-oping a theoretical model of the nervous system usingthe logical notion of a neural network. This paper in-fluenced John Von Neumann and played a role in thecreation of theoretical computer science, and it wasalso foundational for various strands of thought thateventually united under the broad rubric of cognitivescience and artificial intelligence.

Tara Abraham is an historian of science at the Univer-sity of Guelph in Canada. Her biography documentsMcCulloch’s childhood and education and the succes-sive stages of his career in science, as he went fromneurophysiologist to neuropsychiatrist, then on to apromoter of cybernetics, and finally to a kind of engi-neer investigating the neurocircuitry of animal brains.She views McCulloch as someone who “self-fashioned”a succession of “performative identities.” In so doing

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Figure 9: Warren Sturgis McCulloch (1898–1969)

he exhibited a new form of “transdisciplinarity” thatbrought together, at the middle of the century, dis-parate strands of research in science, medicine andphilosophy. (The terms in quotes are ones that ap-pear as interpretative constructs in recent biographicalwritings in the history of science.) Abraham’s book isthe product of extensive research and is informed bythe substantial historical and philosophical literaturethat exists on various facets of McCulloch’s scientificwork. It is the most detailed and perceptive accountof his life and scientific thought to date.

McCulloch grew up in Orange, New Jersey, the sonof an estate manager of comfortable means. While anundergraduate major in philosophy and psychology atYale University, he showed an interest in mathemat-ics. His senior thesis in psychology focused on whetherhuman subjects showed an esthetic preference for ge-ometric figures such as rectangles that involved thegolden section. (Figures that did so were said to dis-play “dynamic symmetry.”) McCulloch continued thisproject in his Masters work at Columbia Universityand went on to Columbia’s medical school, becominglicensed as a physician in 1927. In the following yearshe carried out research in experimental neurology atColumbia and New York hospitals.

In 1934 McCulloch moved to Yale and began a seriesof researches with Dusser de Barenne on the functional

organization of the cerebral cortex of primate brains.In 1941 he moved to the Illinois Neuropsychiatric In-stitute where he assumed administrative duties over-seeing a range of research programs. At INI his ownwork centered on convulsive therapies for treating ma-jor mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. He collabo-rated with the emigre Hungarian researcher Ladilas J.Meduna on metrazol therapy (involving induced con-vulsions), and he tried to explain the e�cacy of thistherapy in terms of carbohydrate metabolism. Thisform of treatment of mental illness anticipated themore widely used electroshock therapy that emergedin the 1950s. McCulloch and Meduna were firm adher-ents to a biological approach to psychiatry that was atodds with the then influential Freudian paradigm.

At Illinois McCulloch came into contact with NicolasRashevsky and his Committee on Mathematical Biol-ogy at the University of Chicago. During this periodhis scientific interests also took on a somewhat moreabstract and philosophical character. McCulloch andhis family (wife Rook and four children) assumed therole of mentor for younger researchers and their fam-ilies and took under their wing the student WallacePitts. McCulloch and Pitts’ 1943 paper was publishedin Rahevesky’s Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics.In the immediate post-war years McCulloch becameinvolved in the cybernetics movement and served aschair of the famous Macy Conferences on Cyberneticsfrom 1946 to 1951. In the latter year he moved to theMassachusetts Institute of Technology to carry out re-search on the brain circuitry of frogs and cats with hisformer Illinois colleagues Pitts and Jerry Lettvin.

McCulloch and his like-mined contemporaries saw incybernetics a way of providing a naturalistic explana-tion of such notions as teleology and purpose. Beforethe war linguistics was the basis of philosophical con-ceptions of the unity of science, a fact expressed in thewritings of philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap. Afterthe war researchers turned to cybernetics as a unifyingtheme. Abraham summarizes the prevailing belief (p.131): “Understanding purposeful systems in terms ofnegative feedback would result in greater understand-ing across disciplines.” During the later 1950s the cy-berneticists with their emphasis on brain modeling andanalog processes became somewhat isolated from whatwould become the mainstream of research in cogni-tive science. The latter relied on the metaphor of thecomputer-mind and employed information-processingmechanisms in their models. While the 1943 paper

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on neural networks was arguably encompassed withinsuch an approach, McCulloch’s emphasis on brainphysiology and experimental neurology was at oddswith the developing direction of research.

In 1965 McCulloch published Embodiments of Mind, acollection of article reprints, lectures and miscellaneaon various aspects of his work in science. Includedwas the essay, “What is a number, that a man mayknow it, and a man, that he may know a number,”originally published in 1961 in the Bulletin of Cyber-netics. McCulloch found it easy to define what num-ber is, adopting the logicist conception (attributed toBertrand Russell but in fact originating with GottlobFrege) of a whole number as the set of all sets thatcan be put in one-to-one correspondence with a setcontaining the given number of elements. The majorpart of the essay was devoted to the title’s second ques-tion, examining how humans come to know numbers, aquestion that McCulloch believed could ultimately beexplained in terms of brain modeling and the logic ofneural networks. One colleague at MIT remarked thatMcCulloch “looked and talked like God.” He and Rookcontinued to play an active role in mentoring youngerinvestigators, including taking them into their Cam-bridge home and the McCulloch family farm in OldLyme, Connecticut. McCulloch’s support of juniorcolleagues and his generosity towards them were ac-knowledged in the tributes to him following his death.Always of a somewhat expansive temperament, in thelast decade or so of his life he began to think of himselfas kind of a sage of science and an eminence grise toyounger researchers.

From his student days until his death McCullochdabbled in poetry, favoring the sonnet form, and hecrafted a slim volume of poems that was published inlimited edition in 1959. Abraham ends her biographywith a poem McCulloch wrote in his last years, wherehe mused on his legacy:

When I am dead let no man sayThat, I had lived, I had done so and so:For I was always on an unknown wayTo mine own ends, the which they could not

know!

Acknowledgment: I would like to thank Hardy Grantfor comments on a penultimate draft of this review.

Craig Fraser

PhilMath-Archive LaunchedPhilSci-Archive is pleased to announce the launch ofthe PhilMath-Archive, philsci-archive.pitt.edu/philmath.html, a preprint server specifically for thephilosophy of mathematics. The PhilMath-Archive iso↵ered as a free service to the philosophy of mathemat-ics community. Like the PhilSci-Archive, its goal is topromote communication in the field by the rapid dis-semination of new work. We aim to provide an acces-sible repository in which scholarly articles and mono-graphs can find a permanent home. Works posted herecan be linked to from across the web and freely viewedwithout the need for a user account.

PhilMath-Archive invites submissions in all areas ofphilosophy of mathematics, including general philoso-phy of mathematics, history of mathematics, historyof philosophy of mathematics, history and philosophyof mathematics, philosophy of mathematical practice,philosophy and mathematics education, mathematicalapplicability, mathematical logic, and foundations ofmathematics.

The PhilMath-Archive is sponsored by the Interna-tional Association for the Philosophy of Mathematics(PMA), the Canadian Society for History and Philos-ophy of Mathematics (CSHPM), The British Societyfor the History of Mathematics (BSHM), the Asso-ciation for the Philosophy of Mathematical Practice(APMP), and the Philosophy of Mathematics SpecialInterest Group, Mathematical Association of America(POMSIGMAA).

Elaine Landry

York University Computer MuseumIn the May 2017 issue of the Bulletin, I noted thatthe York University Computer Museum (YUCoM),www.cse.yorku.ca/museum, was one of the resourcesfor the history of mathematics available in Toronto. Ivisited with the museum’s director, Zbigniew Stach-niak (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science),this September 18 at both his o�ce and the Museumin the Engineering Faculty’s Lassonde Building. Whilelearning about the museum’s origin, purpose, opera-tion and holdings, I was also treated to a delightfulshow and tell from the history of Canadian comput-ing.

For instance, there’s a very solid Burroughs mechan-ical calculator (ca 1920), manufactured in Windsor,

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Ontario, and sporting beveled glass side panels to per-mit admiration of its guts. Or there’s the desk-sizedanalogue computer EAI TR-48 (1961), donated by theHamilton Airplane Museum and bearing the metalplate “(D. D. P.) [for Department of Defense Pro-duction] CANADIAN GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. . . 2.” And the HP 65 (ca 1975), the first hand-heldprogrammable calculator, whose programme storagewas insertable magnetic strips. And also the frontpage of April 23, 1973, issue of the Danish newspaperPolitiken, with its photo of an MCM 70 in an attachecase, demonstrated by the Canadian electronics engi-neer Ted Edwards at APL Congress 73, then underwayin Copenhagen.

Then I was shown that exact same “Executive Proto-type” with its 32-character display and APL alphabet-ical and function keyboard. The numerical keyboardwas missing, as was the cover for the magnetic cassetteplayer where the programmes would be stored. Thiswas part of the archive from Micro Computing Ma-chines (MCM), which is at the heart of this computermuseum.

In 2002, the MCM archives became available to Cana-dian history of computing scholars. But there wasn’tany computer museum in Canada to take them. So,under Zbigniew’s leadership it was decided to estab-lish one at York as an academic resource to preservethe hardware, software and documentation as well asthe knowledge about how to use them. Acquisitionshave been steadily arriving as the museum’s reputa-tion grows, with about 100 Canadian companies cur-rently. The emphasis is on Canadian computing, butsome non-Canadian icons of computing are also rep-resented.

Up to ten volunteers are helping out at any giventime. One or two might be archiving and catalogingdonations, while a couple of hardware engineers areconstructing, reconstructing or emulating an object’soriginal hardware. Some of Zbigniew’s own computerscience students might be recovering software from pa-per tapes or punch cards. There are usually some re-searchers who, for example, might be examining elec-tronic bulletin board printouts from the late 1970s,collecting data on computer usage. Students takingspecial project courses also conduct research on thecollections. Many visiting historians come from a vari-ety of disciplines. And of course news media visit regu-larly, on the anniversaries of major computer hardware

developments.

Though YUCoM primarily operates as a scholarly re-source, it also holds public activities. At York’s Sci-ence and Engineering Days, visiting high school stu-dents get to play vintage video games. Displays aremounted around campus, such as Personal Comput-ing, in the foyer of the Steacie Science Library. AtYUCoM, the exhibition IBM@York, to commemorateboth the centennial of IBM Canada and the semi-centennial of computing at York, opens in November2017. The basis for this photographic exhibition is acollection of about 200,000 images on loan from IBMCanada, including a 1917 photo of the IBM Canadao�ces in Quebec City.

YUCoM is also preparing a major permanent interac-tive exhibition of its treasures for 2018. But more ofthis anon (in a projected second part of this article toappear in the May 2018 Bulletin), along with a morein-depth look at some of the special collections likeIBM Canada, MCM, Ottawa’s NABU Networks fromthe 1980s, or York computational chemist Huw OwenPritchard’s professional archive. Should you come toToronto, why not take a look at YUCoM?

David Orenstein

CSHPM on Social MediaCSHPM content appears on two social media plat-forms: Facebook and Twitter. Links to each ap-pear on the CSHPM home page; web users can alsocome across them at www.facebook.com/cshpmschpmand twitter.com/cshpmschpm, respectively. Posts onboth pages can be viewed without having an accounton the relevant platform. People who are signed in toFacebook can post material on that page, although atpress time no one had ever done so. (One potential useis announcements from other societies that may be ofinterest to CSHPM members and visitors.) “Follow-ers” of either page can share the announcements withtheir own social media audiences, potentially increas-ing the reach of CSHPM activities. Webmaster MikeMolinsky maintains the sites.

General Meeting HSSFCThe 2017 Annual General Meeting of the General As-sembly of the Federation for the Humanities and So-cial Sciences was held the Sunday evening of Congress(May 28). The General Assembly is made up of repre-

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sentatives from the Federation’s member associationsand institutions. It meets annually to receive annualreports and financial statements, sanction changes tothe by-laws, approve applications from new members,and discuss topics of relevance to the humanities andsocial sciences community. A Nominating Committeeidentifies candidates for the Board of Directors; if ad-ditional candidates stand for positions during an opennominating period each January and February, thenthe General Assembly also votes for the Board of Di-rectors.

As the delegates were served dinner, outgoing Feder-ation president Stephen Toope reported that Ryersonwas hosting the largest Congress ever. Representa-tives from the University of Regina extolled the at-tractions and preparations for the 2018 Congress, al-though I still concluded that our decision to meet withthe Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA) is theright one for us.

The business meeting was held over dessert. Toopeprovided an update on Federation advocacy e↵orts,which included five policy papers; announced a memo-rial fund to honor feminist activist Wendy Robbins;and discussed an ongoing evaluation of services o↵eredto Federation members. The sta↵ were very happywith how the first webinar, on membership recruit-ment and retention, went and are entertaining futureproposals, but they have decided to take a break fromo↵ering the annual conference in the fall in order tobetter tailor it to member needs. The Federation hadaccidentally lost its charitable status and was workingto restore it. Delegates approved the 2016 financialstatements and audit, and one new member was ap-proved.

Guy Laforest of Laval accepted the gavel as the incom-ing president. We voted to destroy the ballots from the2017 election (the records are retained), which is usualpractice for the Federation. CPA’s Sandra Lapointeis one of the new members of the Board of Direc-tors. Laforest closed the business meeting by promis-ing to continue to improve Congress and to celebrateinterdisciplinary studies, while he asked members tohelp further the Federation’s mission in these turbu-lent times. He took questions from the audience: theAGM will always be at Congress, but the day of theAGM is open for discussion; the Board wants to lis-ten to members and so strongly encourages societiesto register for the breakfast conversations held during

Congress; a working group continues to advocate withSSHRC for the restoration of graduate student travelfunding.

Amy Ackerberg-Hastings

New MembersCongratulations to the following new members whohave joined the Society since our last Bulletin. Welook forward to your contributions.

Amanda AikenWhite House, TNUSA

Bernd BuldtIndiana University–Purdue University Fort WayneFort Wayne, INUSA

Eamon DarnellToronto, ONCanada

Scott EdgarSt. Mary’s UniversityHalifax, NSCanada

Sepehr EhsaniToronto, ONCanada

Nicolas FillionSimon Fraser UniversityBurnaby, BCCanada

Johan GaeblerCambridge, MAUSA

M. Joshua MozerskyKingston, ONCanada

Nathan OttenKansas City, MOUSA

Fillippos PapagiannopoulosWestern UniversityLondon, ONCanada

Alessandro SelvitellaHamilton, ONCanada

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Valerie Lynn TherrienLondon, ONCanada

Inna TokarFort Lee, NJUSA

Jai Chum TsaiKaohsiung CityTaiwan

From the EditorOur November issue is always full of Society news andbusiness. Thanks to Colin McKinney and Pat Allairefor submitting photos from our 2017 meeting. SinceRyerson, a number of developments have transpired inthe planning for our 2018 gathering with the CanadianPhilosophical Society. In case there are any ambigu-ities or contradictions in the rest of this issue, I willsummarize the key data points here (with thanks toDirk Schlimm for assembling the list):

Time: June 4–6, 2018Place: Universite du Quebec a Montreal, MontrealSpecial Session Topic: History of Philosophy ofMathematicsKenneth May Lecturer: Emily Grosholz, EdwinErle Sparks Professor of Philosophy, English, andAfrican American Studies, Penn State University; herpersonal website, www.emilygrosholz.com/, providesa taste of her diverse talents and interests.Special Session Organizer: Dirk SchlimmGeneral Session Organizer: Eisso AtzemaLocal Organizer: Jean-Pierre Marquis

Please consider this your o�cial invitation; the callfor papers also appears elsewhere in this issue. TheCouncil will be adding details to our website as theybecome available; you can also find information atwww.acpcpa.ca/cpages/current. Be sure to thankCPA leaders and members for taking on the heavylifting of working out the logistics for this conference.

The Bulletin reaches your hands or screen due tothe continued e↵orts of Eisso Atzema, Layout Editor;Maria Zack, Production Editor; Pat Allaire, Secretary;and Mike Molinsky, Webmaster. Since Ryerson, Eisso,Maria, and I have also talked about the format of theBulletin and intend to debut a single-column mobile-friendly version with this issue, in addition to our tra-ditional two-column layout.

The next submission deadline for the Bulletin is 1April 2018. As always, the editors seek news itemsof interest to historians and philosophers of mathe-matics, reports on conferences attended, and personaland professional announcements. Ongoing column se-ries include Models of Mathematics (using unique oreye-catching clothing as an entrance point into a his-torical mathematician), O↵ the Shelf (revisiting clas-sic or previously-read works in the history or philos-ophy of mathematics), and Mathematical Ephemera(sightings of oddities in the history and philosophyof mathematics). We also welcome suggestions formemorials, book and web reviews, and informativeor thought-provoking column-style articles. MicrosoftWord (please turn o↵ its auto-formatting features suchas “curly quotes”) and LaTeX data files (not compiledPDFs) are easiest for the editors to deal with. Sub-missions may be sent to aackerbe@verizon.net.

Amy Ackerberg-Hastings

About the Bulletin

The Bulletin is published each May and Novemberby a team of 3 volunteers: Content Editor AmyAckerberg-Hastings (aackerbe@verizon.net), Lay-out Editor Eisso Atzema (eisso.atzema@maine.edu),and Production Editor Maria Zack (Maria-Zack@pointloma.edu). Material without a byline orother attribution has been written by the editors.Les pages sont chaleureusement ouvertes aux textessoumis en francais. Comments and suggestions arewelcome and can be directed to any of the edi-tors; submissions should be sent to Amy Ackerberg-Hastings at the above email address, or by postalmail to 5908 Halsey Road, Rockville, MD 20851,USA.

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